AN ARGUMENT THAT GENERALIZES. In a commentary on the effects of class privilege, Mahablog
correctly notes a clear career-killer.
In most of the U.S. an adult whose articulation, syntax and verb conjugation skills signal IGNORANT HILLBILLY is seriously handicapped.
A Roger Kimball essay on a different phenomenon
provides the generalization.
At its core, as Samuel Huntington pointed out in Who We Are, the United States is based upon certain “Anglo-Protestant values” that generations of immigrants had absorbed and made their own in the process of becoming American citizens.
There ought to be a less inflammatory way to describe those values (or skill sets?) in order that people, no matter their background, do not signal their lack of fitness for responsible tasks.
2 comments:
This is the fight I fight every semester: in the so-called real world, grammar and diction matter; but it ain't PC to think so, so I get ignored, and my mostly rural, differently-grammared students get crappier jobs than they could have gotten had they made the effort to standardize their habits of English usage.
Is your uni's office of institutional research or alumni relations aware of the situation? Wisconsin's alumni office sure pushes the networking opportunities in its recruiting material.
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